Solomine chooses not to delve too deeply into Chinese complexity, even as naturally she strives to express the foreignness of the encounter she has had in fact and fiction.
Tattoos, ragged skinny jeans, and Ramones t-shirts don’t comprise a sartorial image typical of the People’s Republic of China, but any politically repressive society is bound to breed misfits, and Shaun Jefford’s documentary illuminates this previously ignored niche of contemporary life in the Chinese capital.
World War II changed the way we eat, live and work on such a fundamental scale that to those in the West it seems like there has never been anything other than the globalized world it created.
Like the scene in romantic movies where two lovers see each other from across a crowded room and begin running towards one another, culturally the US seems to be rushing towards China as fast as China is rushing towards the US.
Peking, on the edge of World War II, couldn't have been more fraught with tension. The brutal murder of a young Englishwoman was the proverbial match struck to this powder keg of a city.
The diplomat believes he’s a skillful player, he believes he’s in control; but the game is much bigger than he is, and defines what he can and cannot do.
The various threads of Eric Enno Tamm's journey converge and he offers as lucid an insight into China’s malaise as any foreigner could be expected to provide.
Governments tend to take on their worst form, to devolve to their most horrific manifestation, when they kill artists. Artists look out into the horrors of the world, and inevitably, the horrors sometimes reach back.
